"God and all good spirits guard us from it."
"We hear all sorts of evil reports," said a gingerbread baker. "Yesterday I was talking to a Wallachian woman whose husband was faring on the Járas-water on a raft taking cheese to Yorda. He was not a day's journey from his home when the Járas turned, began to flow upwards, and took the Wallachian back to his house from which he had started."
A listening clergyman here explained the matter by saying that the Aranyos, into which the Járas flows, was greatly flooded just then, and it was its overflow which filled up the Járas; in fact it was Divine Providence which brought the Wallachian back, for if he had been able to go on farther, the Tartars would certainly have fallen upon him and cut him to pieces.
"I have experienced everything in my time," said the oldest of the burgesses, "war, plague, flood and pestilence, but there's only one thing I am afraid of, and that is earthquake, for a man cannot even go to church to pray against that."
At that moment the preacher in the church began to speak so loudly that those standing outside could hear his words, and, growing suddenly silent, they pressed nearer to the door of the church to hear what he was saying.
The right rev. Magyari was trouncing the gentlemen present unmercifully: "God prepares to war against you, for ye also are preparing to war against Him. You have broken the peace ye swore to observe right and left, and ye shall have what you want, war without and war within, so that ye may be constrained to say: 'Enough, enough, O Lord!' and ye shall not see the end of what you have so foolishly begun."
Magyari already knew that Teleki, at the Diet of Szamosújvár, had announced the impending war.
Just at this very time two men of the patrician order in sable kalpags were seen approaching, in whom the Klausenbergers at once recognised Michael Teleki and Ladislaus Vajda, and so far as they were able they made room for them to get into the church through the crowd; but the Szekler did not recognise either of them, and when Ladislaus Vajda very haughtily shoved him aside with his elbows, he turned upon him and said:
"Softly, softly, sir! This is the house of God, not the house of a great lord. Here I am just as good a man as you are."
Those standing beside him tried to pull him aside, but it is the peculiarity of the Szeklers that they grow more furious than ever when people try to pacify them; and on perceiving that Ladislaus Vajda, unable to make his way through the throng, began to look about him to see how he best could get to his seat, the Szekler cried in front of him: